Speaking Likenesses

You HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES--Erskine Caldwell & Margaret Bourke-White-- Viking ($5).

Early in this text-&-camera picture of contemporary life in the cotton States. Erskine Caldwell observes: "The South has always been shoved around like a country cousin. It buys mill-ends and wears hand-me-downs. ... It is that dogtown on the other side of the railroad tracks that smells so badly every time I he wind changes." Mindful of the "bad smells"* that have come from the South recently, and with an avowed pro-underdog bias. Author Caldwell and Photographer Bourke-White went down to look things over. After a year and a half of investigation they returned with a skeletonized, unemotional array of case histories, native opinion, commentary and camera evidence on the drearines's and degradation of plantation workers' lives that will chill the stomachs of Northern readers, may remove what charm remains for them in Mammy songs.

Case Histories: Arnold Berry, Negro field hand and tenant farmer on the Teacher Plantation near Wilson. Ark.. gets 75-c- a day ("Not seventy-five cents every day in the year, but seventy-five cents a day when there is something for him to do"), earns less than $200 a year, sinks annually $30 or $40 deeper in debt to the plantation store, is of course forbidden to leave the place until the debt is paid off. He considers himself lucky, however, "that he is a tenant on the Teacher Plantation instead of being a tenant on the [adjoining] Harris Plantation. . . . He has seen things take place there that he is afraid to talk about."

John Sanford, white Georgia native, 27 years a sharecropper on various Emanuel County farms, once "made enough to buy two beds, half-a-dozen chairs, a dresser, a washstand, and the kitchen stove. An-other time he made enough to buy cheaply a second-hand automobile. The furniture has lasted, except for three of the chairs; the automobile did not last. He does not own anything else, except a change of clothes and a few odds and ends. His wife cuts his hair; he pulls the children's teeth when they begin to bother." Last year he made, all told, a total of $70.48.

Native Comment: From a woman in Troy, Ala.: "We've been here most of our lives, my husband and me, and I feel like I'm done for. ..."

From a Magee. Miss, landowner: "If outsiders would stop sticking their noses into other people's business, we'd get along all right down here. We know how to run this part of the country. . . . We know how to take care of the niggers. . . ."

From a Georgia banker: "One of these days the tractor and the mechanical picker are going to catch up with cotton, but by that time it's going to be too late to help the tenant farmer. . . . What it all adds up to is that cotton has ruined ten million people living in the cotton States, and it's going to ruin a lot more before it's through. . . . Some nights I can't sleep at all for lying awake wondering what's go- ing to happen. ..."

Photographs: of a slant-walled sharecropper's shanty near Rose Bud, Ark., the rusted-away body of a Ford roadster in the foreground: "I remember when that automobile was a mighty pretty thing to ride around in."

Of a carpetless cabin-interior at Belmont, Fla., with a crippled Negro boy propped up in a homemade chair: "Little brother began shriveling up eleven years ago."

Of a country school at Harrisburg. Ark.: "Five months of school a year is all I'm in favor of, because I need my children at home to help work the farm."

Of camp meetings, Chain gangs, political rallies; of a huge-columned mansion porch, with a poor-white woman and her child sitting on one of the broad stone steps. "I don't know what ever happened to the family that built this house before the War. A lot of families live here now. My husband and me moved in and get two rooms for five dollars a month."

Co-Investigators Bourke -White and Caldwell admittedly focused their attention and their camera on the poor-white and shanty-nigger side of Southern life, thus present a picture heavily weighted with misery, unrelieved by contrasting views of more prosperous levels. They lay themselves open to charges by patriotic Southerners that a similar investigation of lower-stratum existence in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, might produce equally humiliating results. Meanwhile, You Have Seen Their Faces stands as eye-witness evidence that there are indeed many U. S. citizens ill-clad, ill-nourished and ill-housed.

-As: the Arkansas peonage charges, the Scottsboro trials, the Herndon case, the Tampa trials.

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